Cheese cookie - Kaasstengels

During quarantine (working from home - "WFH"), my working hours have significantly increased and totally random. As a consultant, we are obliged to stand-by for 24 hours a day. In the normal days, an online meeting held at 11pm was rarely to happened (but it happened). WFH brings all the abnormalities in hand LOL. The need to munch is definitely raised as well. Just realized that for my long hours working at the office, I always have cookies, choco, and other various pastries (because sometimes we have to work until the next morning and cookie is my mood lifter). Now that I work from home, many of my cookie "supplier" couldn't provide those to me anymore due to the uncannily long distance (I live faraway from the city) - this will greatly impact the cookies. Kind of sad at first because I love munching while working. There it was, le survival mode ON. I make my own favorite pastry.

This time is kaasstengels, because it's the easiest and just right on top of my head when I was sad about my cookies supply. What you see in the picture is not my first time (but still ugly looking), because kaasstengels is an Indonesian mandatory cookie and I've been making this since kids because the mother(s) in le family always forced us to "assist" them in the kitchen - in a way beneficial LOL. You may find many recipes on the internet, but what important here is the proportion. Proportion of the butter vs. flour, the egg vs. flour, the heat vs. type of baking sheet, if you'd like to mix the flour then the proportion of the types of the flour etc. The type of cheese also plays an important role. In addition to the taste (of course), cheese also affects texture. For me, I'd like my kaasstengels to be crunchy but not stone-hard.

Well, unlike French cooking that I can easily rely on the book, the knowledge of this cheese in kaasstengels was obtained from le family, grandma's mouth to mothers' mouths to children's mouth(ssss) - so please do your own research first. We always use the aged cheese like Edam because of the hard texture, and indeed the taste. I once tried to use Gouda - delish as well, but not as hard as Edam, so my kaasstengels was not really crunchy. To me, Gouda is better with pasta or chili. In making pastry at home, I don't use electric mixer and cake mould (because I don't have any), so the process (and result) might slightly different. This is my first time using an electric oven because my gas oven is broken. At first, I used Soju bottle to roll the dough, then I bought a proper rolling pin to get the exact thickness level that I want. This electric oven thing is another issue because it affects the baking process (and almost everything) LOL. So it's very important to have a deep knowledge about our kitchen equipment prior to cook anything.

I used to mock my cousins' or friends' fingers using this "kaasstengels" term. Because in Dutch, "kaas" is cheese and "stengels" is some kind of stick. Anyway, happy munching.